Long Shadows: The Lycanthropy Files, Book 2 Read online

  Oh, right, that was just a pretend kiss. But his physiological reaction told me he wasn’t responding to it like it had only been for show. He kept his hand at my waist even after he looked around and remarked that Ray had disappeared.

  “Good,” I said and hoped my comment didn’t come out too breathlessly. “Do you have any idea who he’s working for?”

  “No, and I suspect my superiors don’t, either. Otherwise they would have sent the correct reinforcements. That they haven’t tells me they’re still observing.”

  “So they observed us too?”

  “Likely, but I’ll explain the circumstances.”

  We’d made it back to the car, and he opened the door for me. I was glad we were in his sedan, which was nondescript, and which also meant we sat farther away from each other than we would have in Maddie. When he released my waist, I shivered from the sudden chill spot.

  “You need to get a better jacket,” he said. “You’re cold.”

  “That’s not the problem,” I told him and looked out the window at the town, which seemed so innocent on the surface.

  Max went to bed when we got home, pleading a headache.

  “Coward,” I muttered at him after he’d ascended the stairs. I touched my lips, where I was sure I must be marked like he’d done with my foot, but I’m not sure what the spell was. Probably keeping me from ever being able to kiss anyone else without thinking of him. Oh, wait, maybe that’s the price for his healing me. Seems a bit steep, if you ask me. I slumped on the couch and wished my aunt had been there to guide me through all this. But if she was here, I wouldn’t need Max.

  Too tired to try to puzzle out that paradox, I looked at the remotes. She had neither cable nor satellite. What she did have was a DVD player and some Poirot DVDs, so I popped one in, and soon I’d fallen asleep as well.

  In my dream, I stood outside the house and looked at the full moon overhead. As much as I wished for it to be with my wolf eyes, I could only gaze at it with my human ones, but the moon appeared as though it had rusted. The air, which had been crisp and cool with the promise of early spring, sat stale and heavy over the landscape, not of any particular temperature, but stifling nonetheless. It made me want to just sit and wait…for what? I had the sense that something had called to me, had called me outside with a promise, but again, I didn’t know what it promised or why I had responded.

  “I need help,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

  A breeze rattled the tops of the branches, a sound like bones dancing, and I flinched.

  “It is within reach,” a big black bird hissed from overhead. It had a crow’s body, but its head was that of a snake, and its wings were more bat-like than bird-like.

  “What the hell are you?” I asked. Good grief, what was in that chicken salad?

  “I should assssk you the same, creature of the night and day.”

  I shook my head. “If you’re not going to give me a straight answer, I’m not interested in talking to you.” I looked around, and the moon reflected off something just below me on the hillside. I walked toward it. The rough terrain and the fact I was barefoot—no practical dreamer, me—required me to keep my eyes on the ground, but I kept the object in sight. When I reached it, I found it was the box from the cave.

  “Where did this come from?”

  “He left it for you.” The disgusting creature had followed me and now sat beside me on the ground. It was close enough for me to see its fangs and talons.

  “Who did?” I scooted away from its carrion breath.

  “The man of the night. The one you see but do not see. He will not be pleased to see the mark of another on you. Why did you allow it?”

  I arched an eyebrow at it. “To keep myself safe.”

  The snake-bird-bat thing chuckled, and its sibilant laughter rasped like blades being sharpened. “To keep yourself safe from what? He toys with you, child. Your heart is not safe here.”

  I didn’t want to take my eye off it in case it decided to strike. “The rest of me isn’t safe here, either.”

  “Then you need to leave.” It made a shrug-like motion and flew off. I struggled back up the hill to the door to the house but found it locked. Sweat poured down my face and into my soaked shirt, under which I had a little river going between my breasts and another down my spine.

  I sat on the step and took a deep breath, but the atmosphere of the place didn’t allow for much comfort. Instinctively, I knew I shouldn’t spend too much time there, but I didn’t know where else to go or how to get out of it.

  “Where am I?” I asked, but nothing answered me. Then I heard music, the lilting saxophone of the closing credits of the DVD mystery I’d been watching. I closed my eyes and followed the music in, holding tight to the box the entire way.

  When I opened my eyes, rather than waking with my hands clutching at empty air as I typically did after that sort of dream, the box was in my lap. It almost fell to the floor, but I caught it so it wouldn’t wake Max with a crash. It looked a little dusty and more dinged up, but just as I remembered it from the day before. I suspected he wasn’t supposed to see it, and this fact was confirmed when I opened it. A handwritten note on top of the cloth that covered the contents read, “Don’t share this information with the wizard. It is for our kind only,” and a black feather fluttered to the ground when I picked up the paper.

  But what is my kind? Broken werewolves?

  I wished again for Wolf-Lonna or my aunt. I suspected either may be able to enlighten me as to what all this stuff meant. At the very least, they would help me talk through it in my head. And where did I go? Maybe Max dragging me into the dream world made it possible for me to go there on my own. But that didn’t sit right with me.

  Heavy footsteps upstairs startled me before I could do more than peek at the box, and I hastily shoved it under the sofa. The feather had disappeared.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Max came down the stairs looking disheveled and worse than when he’d gone to sleep.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  He shook his head and sat on the chair beside the sofa. “What were you doing while I was asleep?”

  The first response that came to mind was, “Nothing,” but that wasn’t exactly true, so I went with the partial truth. “I was watching one of Aunt Alicia’s Poirot DVDs and fell asleep.”

  “Did you dream?”

  “I wasn’t asleep for that long. Less than an episode.”

  He looked at me with bloodshot eyes with dark circles under them.

  “Seriously, you look like hell. Are you getting sick?” I persisted.

  “I wasn’t asleep. I was in a meeting,” he told me, and it occurred to me for the first time that I wasn’t the only one he’d been communicating with through dreams. “And then I got dragged back here by the ward on your foot telling me you were in danger. I didn’t make the transition smoothly.”

  “I don’t think I was in danger. I just dreamed I was talking to a strange bird-snake-bat thing.”

  In a second, he was beside me running his hands about a half inch over my skin. Whatever he was doing tingled, like he was using some sort of static electricity. “It didn’t bite you, did it?”

  “No.”

  “What did it say to you?”

  “Random stuff. It didn’t seem interested in giving me any straight answers, so we didn’t speak much. I dreamed I was outside the cabin, but it was stuffy, and the air was thin and the moon orange.”

  “That was the alpha plane, the borderlands between wake and sleep.” He had reached my face, and instead of tingling me, he cupped my face in his hands and ran his thumbs along my cheekbones. My cheeks grew hot underneath his palms as my imagination—with no help from me, of course—pictured him doing that a little farther down. My nipples betrayed me and stood at attention like he was running his thumbs over them.

  Stop that, I scolded them.

  “So tell me more about that,” I said, lapsing into therapy speak
.

  His elegant lips curled into a smile, but then his face grew serious. “We’re not meant to spend long amounts of time in that zone. Sometimes people get lost there, or sometimes the creatures bite them, and they die in their sleep. No one knows what they are, only that they’re somehow trapped there.” He reached behind me and pulled the feather off the sofa cushion. “I’ll take this so the alpha snake won’t lure you back there again.” He stood.

  I did the same. My body, although no longer tingling, felt like he’d run his hands all over it. “Why do you do this to me?” I asked.

  “Why do I do what?” He looked genuinely surprised, and my mind wanted to throw a “Bless your clueless little heart” at him.

  “This.” I gestured to him, to myself, and the space between us. Our bodies subtly arched toward each other. “You kiss me—just for pretend, of course. Then you run your hands over me even though I tell you I wasn’t bitten.”

  “You may have been without realizing it.”

  I shook my head and crossed my arms over my aching breasts. “You’re giving me mixed signals, Max, and I’m tired of it. You could have made your point to Ray this afternoon without sticking your tongue down my throat in the middle of town.”

  He flopped back into the chair like he’d been deflated. “That was inappropriate of me, and I’m sorry.”

  I snorted. “I didn’t find it to be inappropriate. In fact, I rather enjoyed it.”

  “I did too, and before you so rudely interrupted me, I was going to resign this assignment. I can’t complete my duties with objectivity anymore.”

  My heart, which had danced in anticipation, stilled, and I caught my breath. “You can’t leave me!”

  “The rules are there for a reason, Lonna.” He took my hand. “If I can’t do my job objectively, then it puts you in greater danger. I might miss something important while I’m…” He shook his head again like he was trying to dislodge the emotion.

  “You’re… You care about me?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m feeling.”

  I walked to him, sat on his lap, and ran my hands through his short hair. He didn’t move except for his breathing, and I put my hand over his heart. He clenched his fists and kept them by his side.

  “I think I know what you’re feeling because I feel the same, but I’ve given up on fighting it.”

  “Lonna, we can’t,” he said. “It’s too dangerous for both of us. There are too many secrets.”

  An hour before, I would have challenged him that he was the one with the secrets. Now I willed myself not to glance toward the couch.

  “There’s an easy way to fix that,” I told him and leaned toward him so our lips nearly touched. “Secrets are easy to share with someone you’re falling for.”

  He closed the distance between our lips, and his hands came to my back. This time his kiss was tender, and it burned all the way to my core. He slipped a hand under my shirt, and he cupped my breast like he’d held my face, his thumb on my nipple. I shifted and straddled him, never letting his mouth stop working its magic, and his hand crept around and unhooked my bra. Men had done that before, but never had my breasts felt so full and heavy and ready for someone’s touch. He still had electricity in his hands, which made his touches a thousand times more sensual. I undid the buttons on his shirt and found his chest hair to be soft over hard planes of muscle.

  “You’re incredible,” I said when we came up for air, and I tried to devour him again, but he turned his head away. His hands fell to my waist.

  “You are, too.” He gently pushed me off his lap so I was standing. He tried to stand but grimaced, and the bulge in his pants told me why.

  “I can take care of that for you,” I said. I bent forward to undo his zipper, but he stopped me with strong fingers around my wrist.

  “As tempting as the offer is,” he said. “I can’t. What we’ve already done has put me in enough risk of a court martial.” He put his head in his hands again. “You make me lose control. I can’t.”

  I reassembled my clothing and glared at him. “Why can’t you just let go? I won’t tell anyone.”

  He looked up at me, his eyes the color of a stormy sea. “Because you’re needed by others, and if we were to go further, I would want to have you all to myself. And again, I can’t risk something happening to you because I’m so enthralled with you that I miss something important.”

  “But that’s what love does,” I said. “It grows so that it can be shared.” I took his hand, and for the first time ever, the thought of having someone’s child didn’t weird me out. I could picture a little boy or girl with his eyes and laugh, and my breath caught.

  “That’s not what I meant. Remember when I called you a magnificent creature?”

  “Yes.” I arched an eyebrow. “What did you mean?”

  “You’re different, and there are others who need your talents.”

  “Different how?”

  “You can make a seasoned wizard lose control of his emotions.”

  I grinned. “That’s just you.” But then I remembered Peter. He hadn’t been seasoned as a wizard, and he was a known womanizer, but had I done something to him?

  “I doubt that.” He was finally able to stand. “Fine, I’ll stay on assignment with you because I don’t trust anyone else to watch over you like you need, but under one condition.”

  “What’s that?” I asked, but the feeling of my heart ripping in two told me what it would be before he said it.

  “No more kissing, touching, flirting… From this point, we’re strictly professional.”

  My lower lip went out in a pout, which I remembered I’d been told numerous times made it very hard not to kiss me, so I pulled it back in. “Fine. Good night, then.”

  He sighed. “Good night, Lonna.”

  Once he went back upstairs, I flopped back on the couch. To say every nerve ending felt sexually frustrated would be an understatement. I thought about calling Joanie, but when I was romantically failing, I didn’t want to talk to someone who was in a happy place with it. From what I’d heard in her voice, she and Leo had straightened things out. I eyed the pillows to see which one would be better to punch and/or scream into, but then I remembered the box.

  It seemed like Aunt Alicia didn’t have an easy time of it romantically, either. I didn’t think I’d go to sleep, so I decided to investigate the contents of the box. Just until I got tired enough to take my mind off Max, of course.

  The box held a stack of five journals, an envelope that looked ready to burst with old photographs, and legal documents like birth certificates. At the bottom was a Bible with a family tree inside tracing our family back several generations. On each level was a name in a different color, most recently Alicia, and before that Lucia, both in red ink. My name was there, the only one on that line, in black ink with a question mark beside it.

  Interesting.

  I opened the first journal, which held entries in a child’s scrawl. To an ordinary observer, they would look like typical complaints—We got measured today, and Julia was as tall as me. It’s not fair! I’m the big sister—but I wondered how many of them were actual complaints and how much was a little girl trying to figure out this thing that made her different. From what I could surmise after looking at Giancarlo and my aunt’s pictures, those of us with a touch of magic or werewolf genetics or whatever it was aged more slowly. I skimmed through looking for Lucia’s name and finally found it.

  Aunt Lucia came today. I asked if she brought her dog, and she smiled and said, “always.” Later she went to take a nap, and the dog came out to play. I like it. Its name is Cialu, and it is always very gentle with us even when Julia pulls its fur. Lucia said that someday I may have a dog like Cialu, and Mamma wiped her eyes and said she hopes not.

  “Well, that confirms that,” I said under my breath. “Sort of.” I moved on to the next journal, which was Alicia’s adolescence.

  The boys like Julia because she’s pretty and gent
le, and I worry that someone will take her away from me. I go on occasional dates, but nothing worth recording here. They typically end with the boy telling me I’m too “intense” or “fierce,” and I get angry and call him “immature” or worse. I fear Julia is going to end up losing her virginity before I do. It would be so embarrassing if she’s the one to tell me what it’s like instead of the other way around.

  “Okay, that’s more than I wanted to know about my mother.”

  The third journal was from Aunt Alicia’s college years, which held similar complaints about Julia’s popularity with the boys, but also about how hard it was to manage the changes.

  I am not like Aunt Lucia. I cannot walk outside my body, but must change every time. My parents have gotten me an apartment in town close to school. It’s on the ground floor, so I can leave a window open to get in and out after my change, but it’s still hard in the middle of the city. Maybe I should have gone to school in the country, but I so wanted to be normal, and environmental programs with the concentration I wanted were difficult to find.

  Then came the one in her twenties and thirties, which she only kept sporadically. This time I looked through for mentions of Giancarlo, and I found it.

  A young man appeared today at the Forest Preservation Board offices. He said his name is John Carlo, and he was here to see me. Suzie brought him into the conference room, and I couldn’t help but notice his wavy Italian hair and soft brown eyes, like a puppy dog’s. He’s pretty hot all over. He said he was sent by his superiors to help me because I’m doing things inefficiently, but he didn’t mean at the office. He meant with my changing and how I’m handling everything around it. He’s like me, and for the first time, I had hope that maybe there is someone for me, after all.